Does collective unfreedom matter? Individualism, power and proletarian unfreedom

ABSTRACT

When assessing institutions and social outcomes, it matters how free society is within them (‘societal freedom’). For example, does capitalism come with greater societal freedom than socialism? For such judgements, freedom theorists typically assume Individualism: societal freedom is simply the aggregate of individual freedom. However, G.A. Cohen’s well-known case provides a challenge: imagine ten prisoners are individually free to leave their prison but doing so would incarcerate the remaining nine. Assume further that no one actually leaves. If we adopt Individualism plus the standard liberal view of freedom, such incarceration seems to leave societal freedom unaffected. This is an important theoretical challenge: it seems we must either reject Individualism or reject, or at least amend, the liberal view. Cohen also suggests his case, and the collective unfreedom therein, helps us capture how proletarians are unfree under capitalism. In this article, I argue that we can solve Cohen’s puzzle, if we focus on how power can reduce freedom. If we adopt the republican view of freedom, we can say that prisoners are unfree in Cohen’s case because they are dominated by the other prisoners. This solution keeps Individualism but moves beyond liberal freedom. I then also show how this individualistic framework captures proletarian unfreedom.

KEYWORDS:

• Freedom
• liberty
• republicanism
• G.A. Cohen
• collective unfreedom
• socialism
• capitalism

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Frank Hindriks, Johannes Himmelreich, Charlotte Knowles and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See (Berlin, 1969; Carter, 1999; Kristjánsson, 1996; Miller, 1983; Steiner, 1994) for examples of the first type of view and (Cohen, 2011b, pp. 196–197; Kramer, 2003; Parijs, 1997, pp. 20–24; Schmidt, 2016; Sen, 1985, 1988, 1991, 1999) for the second type. Kramer’s view, as well as my own, are trivalent: Freedom and ability are equivalent. But it is not the case that inability (and lack of freedom) implies unfreedom. One can be ‘merely unable but not unfree’.

2. See (Carter, 1999; Hees, 2012; Kramer, 2003; Steiner, 1983; Sudgen, 1998) for work in philosophy and (Arrow, 1995; Bossert, 1997; Bossert et al., 1994; Hees, 1998, 2004; Klemisch-Ahlert, 1993; Nehring & Puppe, 1999; Pattanaik & Xu, 1990, 1998, 2000; Puppe, 1996; Sen, 1985, 1991) for work in economics.

3. The following theorists either endorse Individualism directly or endorse distributive principles that imply Individualism (Carter, 1999, Chapters 3, 9.1–9.4; Kramer, 2003, pp. 226–240; Norman, 1987; Parijs, 1997, p. 25; Rawls, 1971, Chapter IV; Schmidt, 2016, pp. 190–196; Spencer, 1873, p. 35; Steiner, 1994).

4. Cohen elsewhere argues – independently – that freedom implies an actual capacity to do something (Cohen, 2011b, pp. 193–195). But his case works for both a capacity and a purely negative view (Cohen, 2011b, pp. 193–95).

5. Hindriks argues we should only ascribe freedom or unfreedom to collectives that are corporate agents with decision-making capacities. In Cohen’s case, there is a mere collective without agency (Hindriks, 2008). I leave this conceptual response aside here. I am here focussed on collective freedom in Cohen’s sense, where the collective lacks irreducible collective agency.

6. For example, the Political Challenge does not capture all of Cohen’s own normative concerns which go beyond freedom. In one place, he also responds to the argument that proletarians are responsible for their economic status, because they could each join the (petit) bourgeoisie by working hard. Cohen responds that, because they are collectively unfree, proletarian complaints endure, particularly in light of values such as solidarity (Cohen, 2011a, pp. 159–162).

7. Some argue that collective agents can be ‘autonomous’ (Hindriks, 2014). But I do not think this implies freedom is valuable for autonomous collective agents: first ‘autonomy’ might not mean the same for both collective and individual agents and, secondly, collectives can be agents without being persons with moral standing (Hess, 2013).

8. Such liberal arguments should matter for Cohen. He does not mean for his argument to depend on a specifically ‘socialist’ or moralised notion of freedom. Rather, he argues that socialism grants people more liberal freedom than capitalism (Cohen, 2011a, p. 155).

9. One might respond that rejecting Individualism is compatible with normative individualism, because collective unfreedom can negatively affect individuals. For example, individual proletarians might be unhappy, when they leave their class behind. However, such a response changes the subject. Individualism is about freedom only and excludes other values such as psychological wellbeing.

10. Moreover, we assume things are otherwise equal or prisoners do not otherwise have more freedom in Prison* than in Prison.

11. See, for example, (Laborde & Maynor, 2009; Lovett, 2010; Pettit, 1997, 2012, 2014; Skinner, 2012).

12. Republicans and liberals engage in quite a tussle over who boasts the better theory of freedom (Bruin, 2009; Carter, 2009; Dowding, 2011; Kolodny, 2019; Kramer, 2009; Lang, 2012; Larmore, 2003; Maynor, 2003; McMahon, 2005; Pettit, 2011, 2014; Shnayderman, 2012; Simpson, 2017; Talisse, 2014). I do not argue that republicanism is the better theory all things considered. I only provide one argument which, by itself, is not decisive. Moreover, by including other PI Theories, my argument applies to views that do not fall so neatly onto either side of the liberal-republican divide.

13. See (Hodgson, 2010; Kant, 1996; Neuhouser, 1993; Pettit, 2013; Ripstein, 2010; Rostbøll, 2016; Rousseau, 1754, 1762). List and Valentini have recently suggested another ‘non-republican’ PI view that combines power and freedom (List & Valentini, 2016).

14. See (Schmidt, 2018) for more.

15. According to Pettit, domination implies my freedoms depend on other people’s preferences over whether I should have those freedoms or not. I am not dominated, however, when my freedoms depend on several other people’s orthogonal preferences (Pettit, 2014, pp. 49–50). I am somewhat sceptical that this distinction perfectly tracks domination. But even if it does, my analysis of Prison still holds: my freedoms depend on both, other prisoners’ preferences over orthogonal matters and their preferences over whether I should have my freedoms or not.

16. Relatedly, but differently, Pettit holds that exercised dominating power undermines people’s freedom more than unexercised dominating power (Pettit, 1997). Therefore, because no prisoner leaves in Prison, they cannot be maximally unfree.

17. Can we talk about ‘domination’ seeing that inmates have equal power over one another? Yes. Simple power equality does not guarantee good republican control. I defend the idea of ‘mutual domination’ elsewhere (Schmidt, 2018).

18. Steiner, for example, argues that compossibility is implied by the logic of rights (Steiner, 1977). See (Carter, 1999, Chapters 9.4) for more general objections.

19. Alternatively, one could hold that socially incompossible freedoms can contingently generate individual unfreedom. However, this would not meet the Philosophical Challenge, as prisoners in Prison do not leave. It is somewhat unclear whether Cohen thought incompossibility was conceptually or contingently problematic for freedom. At times, Cohen highlights the contingent connection: ‘As soon as enough people exercise the coexisting individual freedoms, collective unfreedom generates individual unfreedoms.’ (Cohen 1988, p. 270) Nicholas Vrousalis, however, seems to attribute a stronger, conceptual connection to Cohen (Vrousalis 2015, chap. 2; note 9).

20. Kramer individuates freedoms not only with respect to acts themselves but also their causal effects.

21. Kramer’s measure aggregates sets of freedoms and sets of unfreedoms. However, we can ignore this issue here, because including unfreedoms does not change the order over Prison* and Prison.

22. Specifically, the response implies the Hybrid View of overall freedom and that adding the freedom-to-φ-while-causing-something-bad increases overall freedom less than adding the freedom-to-φ-without-causing-something-bad. Carter, for example, attacks the Hybrid View (Carter, 1999, Chapter 5.4, 2005). For the record, I find Kramer’s assumptions here plausible.

23. Liberals respond that they account for domination through the probability with which domination leads to interference (Carter, 2009; Kramer, 2009). However, the degree of non-domination depends on extent and intensity, which is not proportional to the probability of interference. Republicanism thus picks out a separate normative concern. Accordingly, liberals and republicans concur in many of their judgements but diverge in others. And in Prison and Just Sentence, republican judgements plausibly diverge from liberal judgements.

24. Although capitalism might engender those dependencies too.

25. Carter adds that, according to Marxists, proletarians also have the collective freedom to stop being an oppressed class, because they can collectively overthrow capitalism (Carter, 1999, pp. 253–256).

26. I did not discuss Carter’s response earlier, because his response does not help with meeting the Philosophical Challenge. Invoking conjunctive exercisability and probabilities makes no difference in Prison and Prison*, because we assume no one leaves (Kramer, 2003, pp. 229–230).

27. See, for example, (Gourevitch, 2011, 2013; Leipold et al., 2020; Muldoon, 2019; O’Shea, 2020; Roberts, 2019).

28. Roemer develops a different argument. Taking equality of opportunity seriously conceptually implies much greater material equality (Roemer, 2000).

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Andreas T. Schmidt

Andreas T. Schmidt is an Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at the Philosophy Faculty and the Centre for PPE in Groningen in the Netherlands. His research includes topics such as freedom, equality, distributive justice, health policy, tobacco control, consequentialism, behavioral policies, longtermism, and animal ethics. Recent work has appeared in journals such as American Political Science Review (2017), Ethics (2016; 2019), Philosophy and Public Affairs (2018), Philosophical Studies (2017), and Journal of Moral Philosophy (2016; 2020). See www.andreastschmidt.com for more.